All Rise...

The Charge

"Let me tell you something, pal. Half the time, we don't know which side
the law is on. That's the way the wheels of justice turn in this town. And
they're the only wheels we've got."—Lt. Michael Torello (Dennis
Farina)

The Case

The secret is out: Michael Mann's neon-cool '80s were really the neon-cool of
the '60s…with more synthesizers. The proof: Crime Story, Mann's
testosterone and chrome follow-up to his trend-setting Miami Vice.

Lt. Mike Torello (Dennis Farina, Law and Order) looks like a cop but
talks like a gangster. He runs the Major Crimes Unit in Chicago, 1963. His main
adversary is pompadoured Ray Luca (Anthony Denison, The Amy Fisher
Story), an aspiring gangster looking for the big score. To nail Luca,
Torello lies, kidnaps suspects, intimidates witnesses, and generally behaves
much like the crooks he is trying to catch. He might have walked out of a James
Ellroy novel. Luca, by comparison, is only slightly worse, since he actually
goes the next step and kills people. But he also gets comedic sidekicks (Ted
Levine as a rockabilly wannabe and John Santucci as a paisano clown), which give
his scenes a lighter tone than the grim and craggy Torello can manage.

Over the years, Crime Story, which ran for two seasons beginning in
1986, has gained a cult following, with fans clamoring for its release on DVD.
Finally, Anchor Bay has obliged, although without any extras and middling
production value. I missed the show during its original run, but my father was a
fan, so I looked forward to checking out what some people asserted was a lost
masterpiece.

Season One

Unfortunately, Crime Story starts off looking more like amateur hour
than breakthrough television. Chuck Adamson developed the show based on his
experiences as a Chicago cop. As the lead, he brought along his former police
partner, Dennis Farina, with Michael Mann's approval. (They also brought
Santucci aboard, who had been a Chicago crook frequently pinched by Adamson. A
real family affair.) These men may have been good cops, but their inexperience
in television is apparently throughout much of the first season of Crime
Story.

The first half of the season is awkwardly structured, with endless recaps
(reaching 6 ½ minutes in one episode), flaccid editing, and rambling
storylines. An example: "Abrams for the Defense," a courtroom drama
spotlighting series regular Stephen Lang as conflicted attorney David Abrams.
Ving Rhames guests as a man named "Hector Lincoln" (how allegorical is
that for a black character?) who beats up his mean landlord—and spends
much of the episode making painfully preachy and melodramatic speeches. Lang
spends much of his time trying to channel the spirit of Atticus Finch as he
pontificates in front of the white jury. The entire business is uncomfortably
patronizing, more like some, well, early '60s live television play. The only
high point is that the episode marks the start of a love affair between Abrams
and a crusading reporter played by Pam Grier. I mean, who could turn down Pam
Grier?

The show's weak acting does not help the weak writing. Many scenes in these
early episodes have a stage-bound quality. Characters walk into a room, hit
exactly the marks you expect, and pause to wait for somebody to begin a line of
dialogue. Then a beat. Then the next line of dialogue. Even when they are angry.
Or frustrated. It is maddeningly slow. And awkward. Add to this bare sets
(doesn't anybody on this show know how to accessorize?) and the technical
glitches (lighting is flat, and you can frequently see modern cars in the
backgrounds of driving scenes). The very '80s synthesizer music (which is used
much more frequently than the better period tunes) tends to distract from the
scenes as well.

On the plus side, the first season was unusual in its time for its
serialized focus on a single major villain and its parallel storylines, tracking
Luca's rise to power and Torello's increasingly obsessive quest to topple him.
It meanders quite a bit through the first half of the season (compare it to
Wiseguy's noticeably tighter Sonny Steelgrave arc a year later), as if
looking for its focus. That focus finally comes around episode fourteen, when an
extremely stupid U.S. attorney (Ray Sharkey, Sonny Steelgrave himself) goes
after Torello for corruption with an unreliable witness and no actual evidence.
The whole subplot is completely illogical, but it serves a valuable purpose in
the show: it sets the stage for a major narrative turn that refreshes the entire
premise.

One of the key problems with Crime Story in the first half of Season
One is how far outside the audience is from the world of these cops and crooks.
We meet Torello as an already established presence in Chicago, and his brutal
tactics, while realistic for the time (and refreshing for television, especially
in 1986), make him a little unsympathetic. While Luca starts at base level in
the mob, their world is sufficiently alien enough to the audience as to make it
difficult to empathize with him either. And the "gritty" Chicago
setting is fairly remote—it being 1963—to keep the audience at even
more of a distance. Plus, it is hard to see exactly what Luca is going to gain
from taking over the Chicago mob, since we never really see the goal as anything
more than abstract (bookmaking operations that appear only on maps, for
instance). The show as set in Chicago does not have the energy it is clearly
trying to muster.

Welcome to Las Vegas. The final arc of Season One moves everyone to Sin
City, as Luca takes over a casino and Torello and his team join the Justice
Department with an eye toward bringing their nemesis down. The series reboot
means flashier visuals (all that neon looks great on camera), better clothes,
and more focus. Now Luca's grand plans have clear payoffs—not just more
jewelry store robberies, but the glitzy Vegas lifestyle. And even Farina and his
fellow cops seem looser. "I think if we're moving with this much energy in
a month," Torello tells his "strike team," "we might make a
case." Or they might save their show. The final six episodes of Season One
feature Torello and company pushing Luca to the limit, with the stories getting
more, well, like the crazy flash of Vegas. I suspect Adamson and Mann saw the
ratings (even after the Vegas move, they continued to slip) and decided to go
out with a bang—the biggest one they can find. Season One ends with a wild
finale in which Luca is caught in an atomic bomb blast.

Season Two

I expect the producers were surprised, after their apocalyptic finale, that
Crime Story was picked up by the network for a second season. This might
explain why the first few episodes of Season Two skirt the edge of camp. Kevin
Spacey (not yet ready for his breakthrough on Wiseguy—notice how
that show seems such an obvious comparison to this one?) turns up as a
Kennedy-esque senator, and Torello has an affair with Marilyn Mon…oh, I
mean Pamela Palmer (Jenny Wright). Then, Ray Luca is brought back with nary a
scratch thanks to government mad science. He almost stands as the embodiment of
the show's new survival ethic: he has become an amoral supervillain with plans
for a global empire. Think Lex Luthor with lots of hair gel. His new goal is
right out of the mid-'80s of Miami Vice: he makes a deal with the U.S.
government to run guns to Central American rebels in exchange for drug-smuggling
concessions. Very Iran-Contra.

Fortunately, Season Two benefits from better performances all
around—Farina evolves into a sharp actor throughout the season—as
well as tighter editing and direction. Series creators Chuck Adamson and Gustave
Reininger disappear from the story credits, and the show settles into a more
conventional cop show groove. In "Robbery, Armed," the strike team
races to stop a heist. A big gun battle ensues. In "Little Girl Lost,"
a dead private eye leads the strike team on a hunt for a missing girl. A big
chase scene ensues. In "MIG-21," the strike team must baby-sit a
defecting Soviet pilot. Lots of nods to The
Last Detail ensue. Oh, and a chase scene. None of this is deep or terribly
inventive, but it is entertaining and relatively free of the glaring flaws that
made the first season, as "fresh" as it was trying to be, hard to
watch. Compare the two-parter "Moulin Rouge" and "Seize the
Time" in their treatment of racial politics to "Abrams for the
Defense." The Season One episode was preachy and derivative. In this Season
Two tale, the strike team investigates a firebombing in a black-owned casino,
then must outmaneuver the mobsters who try to take control in the
aftermath—African American mobsters. The plot is more action-oriented, the
portrait of race in the '60s is far more complex (in Season One, Ving Rhames was
almost angelic; here we see both sides of the business world: blacks as legit
business owners and as mobsters), and there is a great cameo by jazz legend
Dexter Gordon (and lots of jazz throughout the story). Pam Grier even returns as
reporter Suzanne Terry, although by this point in the series, David Abrams has
joined Luca's side, giving their relationship some necessary tension.

But Crime Story took one final turn in its last half-dozen episodes.
In an apparent effort to continue the show's evolution into a '60s version of
Miami Vice, executive producer Michael Mann and company break up Luca's
U.S. operation with a Senate hearing (a year before the real Iran-Contra scandal
went before Congress), then send Luca fleeing to Central America. Apart from the
cars and a reference to the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, you might easily forget
that this is still supposed to be the '60s. In fact, one of the characters (Bill
Smitrovich as Torello's teammate Danny Krychek) even calls somebody
"homeboy." Anyway, Torello and the strike team head for Central
America for the final few episodes for lots of gunfights, some awful-looking
day-for-night shots, and open war against Luca—leading right into a
cliffhanger only slightly less absurd than the atomic bomb that finished off
Season One. Only this time, the show was not rescued from cancellation.

Until Michael Mann decides to bring back Crime Story with the
inevitable theatrical remake (hey, he did it to Miami Vice!), fans of the
show will have to content themselves with the two Anchor Bay DVD collections.
The downside is that the production on these sets is lackluster at best. Season
One is poorly mastered, with many episodes suffering from soft color and fading.
Audio is weak and flat, with some dialogue hard to understand (no subtitles or
even closed captioning either). I have read that the show was originally
broadcast in stereo, but this mix appears to be in mono (or so flat as to be
practically the same thing). Anchor Bay released Season One a couple of years
ago, and DVD Verdict's own Bill Treadway aptly described it like "cheaply
recorded VHS." The packaging, a foldout box with digipack inserts, kept
falling apart on me. Season Two fares much better. The color saturation stands
up well to all those Vegas lights without noticeable bleed, and the audio is
much clearer (and we get closed captions, but no subtitles).

Crime Story was innovative for its time, even if it had to make a lot
of compromises to stay on the air. But in retrospect, it took too long to find
its footing, and its tendency to change directions for the sake of survival
ultimately weakens it in comparison to shows that more successfully worked the
serialized-drama premise in later years. It tried to switch gears among gritty,
Untouchables style cop drama to earnest "message" stories to
flashy Miami Vice clone to outright camp. When it is good (as in the
Season Two two-parter about the black casino I discussed above), it was very
good. When it was bad…Newcomers to the series may want to begin with the
second season, which feels more polished and focused. If you like what you see,
go back and try the first season, and keep in mind how much the show was feeling
its way along.